Version 3.2

Urban food policies without local food producers

Building urban food movements in post-socialist entrepreneurial cities

Recently, urban food movements have been proliferating in Europe. They highlight the corporate food regime’s failure to tackle nutritional poverty and promote local food initiatives. Also, urban food policy is a new phenomenon in Prague and Brno, two major cities in Czechia. Against this background, we ask how urban institutions are linked to urban food movements in Czech cities. We argue that the current emphasis placed by urban food policies on environmental aspects of food initiatives are indicative of the urban food movements’ fragmentation along the lines of different levels of social capital and their integration into the corporate food regime. Drawing on our interdisciplinary concept of values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime, Manganelli’s concept of hybrid governance of urban food movements and Harvey’s understanding of entrepreneurial urban governance, we conduct actor network and social capital analysis of institutional and civil society actors constituting the urban food question in Prague and Brno. We show that post-socialist entrepreneurial cities are prone to fragmented hybrid food governance inconsistent with other urban agendas, which prioritizes food initiatives conducive to urban entrepreneurialism over traditional food producers such as gardeners, thus reinforcing the corporate food regime. We propose this fragmentation to be overcome by the formation of a coalition of food initiatives with civil society organizations engaged in urban and environmental issues, human rights, social services, and charity, to promote urban governance conducive to local food production and food system change as a steppingstone of urban resilience against multifaceted crises.